62
THE MANAGEMENT OF EPPING FORREST.
to the precise treatment which a patient should undergo that the matter should
be decided by a jury of our "intelligent countrymen."
And now I leave the question in your hands. For my own part I am glad to
state that I feel no alarm as to the future of the Forest under the present manage-
ment. The Editor of "The Gardener's Magazine"—whom I again quote as a
hostile witness—says "there is, of course, no cause for alarm as to the future of
the Forest." The question before us appears to me to resolve itself into a simple
quantitative one as to the number of trees which, in the judgment of those who
are responsible, it has been thought necessary to remove. It is absurd to speak
of the danger of the Forest being made into a park ; you must have realised the
absurdity of this notion for yourselves this afternoon, for you have been through
portions of the Forest from which some thousands of trees have been removed
since last autumn. There is nothing, in my humble opinion, very park-like about
the result so far. It is doing an injustice to the Conservators and the Verderers,
and, I will add, to Mr. E. N. Buxton in particular, to suppose that they or he has
any such ulterior design upon our favourite haunt. And when considering this
question of the amount of thinning, will you kindly make a correction for what
might be called the "personal equation" of the Forest conditions. For the
stacked heaps of felled trunks have not all been cut down from the immediate
area surrounding them, as some of the correspondents seem to imagine, but have
been gathered together from a very much wid:r area, and therefore give an idea
of destruction which to the uninitiated may appear highly exaggerated—not to say
appalling. Also, be it remembered, that the thinning and pruning of trees has to
be done at a period of the year when there is no foliage, and this is another factor
of exaggeration. And lastly, may I appeal to those critics of the recent doings
who are present—and there are many whose opinions I shall estimate most
highly—to favour the meeting with their views as to what ought to be done, as
well as what ought not to have been done, for there has as yet been nothing to
speak of by way of constructive criticism. If these gentlemen would give us their
views as to what the Forest ought in their opinion to be, and how in their
judgment this result is to be achieved , then we can meet on common ground as
naturalists and as lovers of the picturesque, and a useful discussion can be held
in accordance with the scientific and aesthetic spirit which has prompted the
summoning of the present meeting.
Mr. A. D. Webster was next asked to favour the meeting with his views, but
he begged to be excused from doing so, having been chosen as one of the experts
to report upon the Forest, and he thought it best to reserve any observations
until he and his colleagues officially reported.
Mr. Percy Lindley admitted that it was he who wrote the letter in "The Times"
of April 2nd, alluded to above by Prof. Meldola. He thought it only fair to
quote the opinion given by Prof. Meldola in 1882 (in vol. iii. of the "Proceedings
of the Essex Field Club"), and to place in juxtaposition the Professor's statements
in "The Times" of March 31st. Mr. Lindley then spoke of the slope in the
Forest, near his house at York Hill. One morning he found a Dumber of men
going through it—as if they were a sort of scythe—and clearing away the
undergrowth, leaving only a few patches here and there ; cutting down sound
trees, and leaving a few rotten pollards. On Fairmead, three or four seasons ago,
he was astounded to see that young spear trees—the trees that were to form the
future forest—were being laid low, and he wrote to Mr. Buxton, who replied that
he had marked trees to be cut down, and then somebody else went through and
cut down the trees which he had wished to spare. He went on to complain that